Getting Your Core Content Circulated
Every expert with a blog/CMS has core content. Some gurus call it “cornerstone content,” some call it “flagship content” and some call it “pillar content.” It’s the tutorial-style content that you share on your site that demonstrates why you are the authority in your space.
This content has other purposes as well, but today, I’m talking about core content as in the stuff you strut to show that you’re the expert — the white papers, the case studies, the best practices guides, the eBooks, etc.
Because this is the content that demonstrates your expertise, and because the whole point of writing this content in the first place is to raise your profile, you want to make it darned easy for people to share the content with as many other people as possible. If it’s hard to share, the most compelling content in the world (and blog) will die on the vine because nobody sees it.
What do I mean by making your content shareable? I mean: (1) include sharing tools in the content; (2) make using those tools hyper-easy; and (3) for crying out loud, ask for the share.
Sharing Tools
There are at least two ways to do share your core content — the hard way and the easy way, of course. The hard way is only hard once and I can help you with it, if you email me at pluggedinlawyer@gmail.com. This set of sharing tools involves creating a series of hyperlinks Read more…
Ready For Twalking??
Still trying to figure out this Twitter thing? One clever, envelope-pushing company is already on to the next newer thing — phone calls with Twitter.
Web-based phone service JAJAH just released JAJAH@Call in beta, giving participating members the ability to call each other, free of charge, through Twitter.
To make a call, simply send a tweet with“@call @twittername” where “twittername” is the username of the person you wish to call. Your phone will then ring and the call will be connected. All contact details will be kept private, so you can use JAJAH@call without giving your phone number away. For the call to be successful, both you and the person you wish to call must be JAJAH members.
Calls are limited to 2 minutes, ostensibly the talking equivalent of a tweet. As Mashable points out, you’re not going to know who is calling because the phone number won’t show up, but hey, you’re only on the hook for 2 minutes at the most.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your twalkers.
What To Tweet, Lawyer-Style
It can be tricky business knowing what to share out here in the brave new world of social media.
On one hand, we lawyers (and other service professionals) are here to promote our practices, so obviously we should be sharing information that reinforces our brand as authorities.
On the other hand, social media is so wildly popular because it humanizes people that we might want to know and do business with, but don’t have time to personally meet.
For myself, I’ve been working on a short bio that describes me as “a wife, mother, legal recruiter, social media evangelist and tireless advocate of humanistic education for our kids.” This — in a nutshell — is me. Yet, I have hesitated to attach this footer to my professional posts because it’s so counter-intuitive to my lawyer brain to not only share information about my personal passions, but to list them ahead of my professional interests (notice that I don’t even mention “lawyer” anymore). My social media brain is doing battle with my lawyer brain.
Does it make me less of a social media authority or an inferior legal recruiter because I’m so passionate about family and how our next generation is raised? Hardly. But 20 years of legal thinking is hard to set aside.
Twitter presents a classic example of where this quandry comes into play because it is a real-time conversation that happens as real life happens. Heather Morse Milligan put up an excellent post yesterday over at her blog, The Legal Watercooler, that makes an excellent argument for getting personal. The post, Twitter After Dark: What should or shouldn’t I Tweet on??, also offers other practical advice on effective tweeting.
As Heather points out, “People follow you on Twitter not to know what you’re doing at any given moment, but because they are interested in what you are thinking.”
And this comes, as Heather has pointed out in the past, not completely from your professional expertise, but from the fact that people “know, like and trust” you. How do they come to “know, like and trust” you? Because you’ve transparently shared who “you” are. People trust what they think they know and like.
As I’ve found in my own personal journey, it can take some soul searching to understand who “you” are and how to be that person, authentically. But it can also be personally illuminating to ask the questions. Go ahead, lawyer friends, share just a little about your personal self. I dare you.
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Tracy Thrower Conyers is a wife, mother, legal recruiter, social media evangelist and tireless advocate of humanistic education for our kids. You can read more about Tracy’s views on social media at www.pluggedinlawyer.com — a resource dedicated to social media by lawyers, for lawyers and about lawyers. You can also follow Tracy on Twitter at @pluggedinlawyer.
Get Your Message Retweeted
Lawyers love data and evidence, right? Fast Company published an article yesterday based on a new report by viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella. To create his report, Zarella spent nine months analyzing 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets.
Report: Nine Scientifically Proven Ways To Get Retweeted On Twitter reveals which URL shorteners get used in most retweets, the most retweeted words, the least retweeted words, the most desirable punctuation, and the best day and time to tweet, among other stats.
Interestingly, asking for a retweet is not considered spammy, and actually works.
There are comments at the end of the article that dissect the how’s and why’s of the data and try to discredit it. Forget trying to figure out why this works. Just accept the statistics derived from 45 million messages over nine months and use Zarella’s recommendations.
Ask for the retweet and say “please.” Like I’ve been telling you, social media is not rocket science. It’s good old fashioned networking and good manners, repackaged.
Twitter Is A Waste Of Time For Client Development
Not!
Sorry, Larry. I think Kevin has this one.
Blogging About Court Is Off Limits
I’m the first one to admit that sometimes my finger gets a little itchy and I click on “publish” before I should. Hey, we’re busy and in a hurry to move on to the next over-scheduled activity. Sometimes a force bigger than me literally moves my finger to that button by “accident.” If you’re like me, you better skip “penning” any words relating to the judiciary, so you don’t make any blunders that could end up getting you disbarred.
As we were reminded last week in an article posted by the New York Times, lawyers blogging about court don’t enjoy all the same 1st Amendment protections that your typical blogger does.
The story opens by reminding us about the Florida trial lawyer who vehemently disagreed with the way a judge was handling a case related to his criminal defense client. You can tell that this guy is passionate about his job by looking at his website bio, but flaming court personnel is never okay, even here where the judge’s conduct is so outrageous that it landed her on trial before the Judicial Qualifications Commission.
The guy jumped on a fast and loose blog created by some of his fellow defense attorneys and let go with his frustrations. He originally consented to a reprimand from the bar, but the State Supreme Court, which reviews cases like this, demanded briefing on 1st Amendment issues. Weighing the 1st Amendment against his obligations as an officer of the Court, the attorney was on the wrong end of the conclusion and got hit with a $1200 fine.
That relatively de minimis fine is nothing compared to what is going to happen to the hapless attorney who blogged about Judge Clueless.
Your obligations as an officer of the court don’t just extend to cases where you are appearing on behalf of a client, either. Just ask the San Diego attorney who was suspended from the bar for 45 days, paid $14,000 in legal fees and lost his job for blogging about a case where he sat as a juror.
I know it can be tempting to blow off steam in a public way, but officers of the court (yes, you) signed on to a certain code of conduct. To older attorneys, the concept of utter discretion is obvious and often trotted out as an excuse to avoid social media altogether. For younger attorneys who live their lives by the transparency of social media, discretion (at least as the older generation defines it) is going to be a hard lesson to learn.
Don’t forget, online is forever.
Plugged In Lawyer 